How to Speed up WORDPRESS Site – Everything You Need to Know

Is your website too lazy to load? Is the performance of your WordPress theme impacting a negative effect on your business? Are you willing to boost WordPress speed and performance?

If your answers to all questions are yes, today this article is just for you to satisfy your needs. I will discuss ins and out of boosting WordPress speed and performance and provide you with the step by step guideline and tips for best optimization.

I have also tried my best to cover all discussion like the importance of boosting WordPress speed and how to boost your website performance with the best and actionable process.

To make it easy to understand all steps of boosting, I have made a list of the steps one by one. It will help you to understand what we are going to cover in this article and also help you to find out exactly what step you need.

Importance of Speed Up WordPress Site

The boosting of your WordPress site speed is very important because it will help to generate more traffic. A speedy website provides a better user experience to the users.

Usually, the users don’t try to visit the heavy loaded website because it breaks down the passion of the users. As a result, you will lose your expected traffic. So, the speedy website plays an important role in SEO.

The speed of the website also has an effect on the bounce rate in SEO. Usually, the lazy loading website increases the bounce rate which is harmful to SEO. But in the case of a speedy website, it decreases the bounce rate which helps to rank.

From 2000 to 2016, all studies show that the average human attention span is from 12 seconds to 7 seconds.

Can you understand what means with the above sentence? I want to clear it to you so that you can get a clear concept about human attention duration.

The statistics show that you just have an average of 7 to 12 seconds to show your content to the users. If your site takes more times to load, you won’t be able to draw the attention of your users with your content. So, it is important to speed up your website.

How You Will Check the Current Speed of Your Website

Often the owners of the website make a mistake in case of understanding the actual speed of his website. This mistake is done because they don’t feel slow on their computer. But never mind that your website is fast.

As you visit your website frequently, the modern browsers like Chrome store your website in the cache and prefetch it automatically when you start typing an address. That is why your website loads fast in your own browser.

But in the case of the other users, they may not get the same experience as like as yours. It is must that the other users from other browsers will get a different experience.

So, the speed in your own browser of your website is not the actual speed of your website. For this reason, you have to use different tools to check your website speed.

There are a number of tools in the online to test the speed of the website and all are free I mean open source for use. These tools are most useful because they not only test your website but also they will suggest a number of issues to fix those to speed up your website.

First I want to recommend you to use isitwp’s WordPress speed test tool. It will show the website speed and suggest you improve the speed of the website.

There are also a number of speed testing tools. I am sharing a list of them. They are –

All tools will suggest a number of topics for the improvement of your website. Some tools like GTmetrix and Google PageSpeed Insights will display the difference of your website speed on different devices like desktop and mobile version.

If the loading time of the website is under 2 seconds, it is called the better speed of the website. However, more improvement is always better for your website.

What Makes Slow down the Speed of Your Website

All speed testing tools will show a report of multiple recommendations for the improvement of your website speed. But most of the recommendations are related to technical jargon which is absolutely complicated for beginners and the person who is not a developer.

But, in this article, we will discuss all guidance for the beginner so that a person can speed up his website without knowing any coding.

Now, we will make a list of features which makes slow down the website but these are the key to improve the speed of the website.

So, the primary causes which make slow the website are –

Web Hosting – Web hosting plays an important role in the performance of the website. Poor web hosting always makes down the speed and performance of your website. If the web hosting is not configured properly, it can slow down your website.

WordPress Configuration – WordPress Configuration is also important for your website performance. Because if your WordPress can’t serve the cached pages, it will overload your server. As a result, it will make your website slow.

Page Size – Large page size also affect the performance of the website. Usually, the page size becomes high due to the images. So, image optimization is required.

Bad Plugins – Poor coding plugins also have a bad effect on the performance of the Website. If you use the plugins which are poor coded, it will make slow down your website performance.

External scripts – External scripts can make slow down your website speed. External scripts such as font loaders, ads or something like these.

Choose a Good Hosting for Your WORDPRESS Theme

A good web hosting of your website plays an important role in the case of your website performance. Because a good shared hosting provider like Bluehost or Siteground provides some extra measures and care for the optimization of your website performance.

However, in the case of shared hosting, you have to share the server resources with my other customers, as a result, if your neighboring websites get more traffic, it can make slow down your website. So, you can say that it is a great disadvantage of shared hosting.

If you want to get a better option for your website and want to avoid the problem related to shared hosting, there is a better option and you have to choose managed WordPress hosting. In the case of managed WordPress hosting, the cost must be higher than shared web hosting.

But you will get the most optimized configuration for our website which will provide you with the best performance. Managed WordPress hosting providers also offer you a number of facilities like automatic backup, WordPress automatic update and more security configuration to protect your website.

However, the choice is yours depending on your budget for your website. But we recommend taking service from WPEngine for managed hosting which is one of the most popular managed hosting providers.

Easiest ways to speed up a WordPress theme

As already I have told that we are going to learn to speed up WordPress performance without knowing any coding I mean this article is a complete guide from beginners to advanced users, so I will discuss the ways where no code editing skill is required at all.

However, I will also show you the ways so that we can easily speed up the WordPress website just with a few clicks.

So, finally, we are going to discuss the ways of optimizing the speed of WordPress website.

Installation and configuration of cache removing WordPress plugins

The WordPress posts are pages are dynamic. To display a page to the visitors, WordPress has to do a number of processes and also need to find much information. Finally, WordPress puts them together and display to the users.

This process involves many steps which can slow down the performance of your website because of visiting different users at different times.

For this reason, we always recommend using a caching plugin on every WordPress website. The caching plugin will make your website faster from 2x to 5x. So, a caching plugin plays an important role.

Now let’s go to discuss the benefit of using a cache plugin.

As we have already told that generating a page in WordPress is a long process, in this case, a cache plugin avoids this generating process every time. Instead of this, the cache plugin makes a copy of the page after the first load. As a result, the cached version is shown to every subsequent user.

Now Let’s Go to Understand the Process in Details with an Easy Way

When a visitor visits your WordPress website, then your web server collects all information from PHP and MySQL and puts them together in HTML Content. Finally, the HTML Content is displayed to the visitors.

Really it is a long process and if you want to skip this long process, you have to use a caching plugin. There are many plugins available for this purpose but we recommend to use WP Rocket (premium) or WP Super Cache.

Many hosting companies provide a better option for this type of caching. I want to discuss the most popular hosting provider like Bluehost and Siteground.

Are you using Siteground? If yes, you have a better option for cache plugin. If you login to the Cpanel, you will find SuperCacher under “Site Improvement tools”. Now just enable it. After enabling it, you have to install and active SG Optimizer to manage the settings of SuperCacher.

Bluehost Caching

If you are using Bluehost shared web hosting, you have to turn no-cache option. You will find this option from My Sites tab and then go to Performance option and turn on Caching.

But if you are using managed web hosting, it has a better option for you and you don’t need to do something. Because it has built-in support and that option is on by default.

Optimization of images for speed

Graphical representation with different images is the heart of your content. It will attract your readers to stay on your website for a long time. As a result, the dwelling time will increase and decrease the bounce rate.

But you must need to optimize your images. Otherwise, these images may be more harmful to your website than a better result. Because the most powerful reason for making your website slow is the size of the images. So, image optimization can’t be skipped at all.

So, before uploading an image directly to your website from your computer or camera, I recommend editing the image with software for optimization.

You have to optimize the images because the original sizes of the images are higher than the optimized images. So, if you optimize your images, it will be up to 5x smaller than the original sizes.

However, I recommend using just JPG and PNG format images on your website. You may be a wonder. What’s the difference among different formats of different images?

To make it clear to you the difference among different images, let’s go to discuss it in details.

PNG format image is uncompressed. If it is compressed, it loses some information and the size of the image will reduce. So, the size of the compressed image is smaller than the uncompressed image.

As the compressed images are a smaller size, they will take less time to load than the uncompressed images. As a result, compressed images will increase the performance of your website.

JPG format image is compressed. Although it reduces the quality of the image, it significantly smaller in size and takes less time to load.

Now, come to take a final decision to choose a format either PNG or JPG. I want to share two tricks to choose the image in a perfect format.

If your photo or image contains a lot of colors, you have to choose JPG format for your images. There is another reason for using JPG images. If your image has an essential background and you don’t want to skip it, the JPG format is perfect.

If your photo or image contains just a single color or a transparent background, you have to choose the PNG format.

Ways of optimizing images

I can share two ways to optimize your images. One is to edit your images with photoshop or photo editing tools before uploading it to your server. Another is to use a WordPress plugin which optimizes the images. Here I want to share two best plugins to optimize your images.

Best Practices of Optimization of WORDPRESS Performance

Hey, you have done a lot to speed up your WordPress website performance. If you have followed my mentioned steps and done the cache removing and image optimization successfully, you will find that your website is faster than before.

But if you still need more optimization of your website, you have to follow the following steps. These tips and techniques are super simple and easiest steps. So, you don’t need to be more skilled or you don’t need to have any coding knowledge for implementation.

These techniques will prevent the issues that make slow down your website and I believe that if you follow these tips, it will keep your website always faster. So, let’s have an overview of all the awesome tips.

1. Always keep the update of your WordPress site

As you know that WordPress is an open-source for all. So there is a great possibility to be hacked its security. For this reason, WordPress is always updated frequently. Every update may not contain new features. WordPress is updated regularly for its security and bug fixing.

So, as the owner of your website, it is your responsibility to update WordPress regularly. Always, you must try to use the latest version of WordPress for your theme and it is highly recommended for getting the best and latest security and bug-free.

Besides WordPress update, your existing plugins are also updated regularly. So, it is the best practise to update your existing plugins if anyone asks for updating.

So, always, keep your website up to date for getting more security and bud free. Besides, it will optimize your site and make it faster.

Optimization of Background Processes

Background processes are scheduled tasks in WordPress which run in the background of your WordPress website. These tasks work for specific purposes. Some of the common jobs are following-

WordPress backup plugin which works for taking the backup of your website.

WordPress cron job which publishes the scheduled posts

WordPress cron job which checks the update of WordPress

Search Engines which try to fetch content

Other crawlers which also try to fetch content

Among these jobs, cron jobs for publishing scheduled posts and for checking the WordPress update have a simple impact on making your site slow.

But the backup plugin process and excessive crawling by search engines have a great impact on your website and these can make your website slow.

For this reason, you have to follow some tips. For backup plugin, you must need to be ensured that the backup plugin is only running when traffic is low in your website. Then you also need to adjust the frequency of backup and data which are needed to be backed up.

Using Excerpt Instead of the Full Content on the Homepage and Archive Page

Showing the expert of any post has a great advantage both optimization of your site speed and increasing the page views.

By default, the WordPress displays the full article of any post at homepage and archive page which is related to any archive page like the author, tag, category and date archive.

Showing the full article has two bad effects on your website. First one, it will slow down your website speed because of loading the full content for each post on the homepage or archive page.

The second one, the visitors don’t feel to see the full article. For this reason, if the full article is displayed on the homepage or archive page, it will reduce the page views

So, in order to speed up your website and for a super optimization you have to show the excerpt of every post instead of using the full content.

To set the post excerpt for every post, you have to follow the following steps.

First, go to the Reading option menu under settings from your dashboard. Then select Summary instead of Full Text in For each article in a feed, show.

Split the Comments into a Number of Pages

Display all comments on a page also has a bad effect on your website speed. It makes your website slow.

Getting more comments is always better for your website because it indicates that your audience is increasing more and more but showing those comments on a single page is bad for your website.

So, you have to split your all comments into a number of pages. Which will remove this disadvantage? For doing this, WordPress has a built-in solution. Simply go to Setting -> Discussion. Then check the option box “Break comments into pages”.

Always Try to Use a Content Delivery Network (Cdn)

The location of your web server has an impact on the speed of your website. For this reason, remember one thing is that the users from different locations can experience different loading times of your website.

Suppose, you are using a hosting server from the United States, it means your website is hosted on the server of United States. In this case, the users who are visiting your website from the United State will get your website faster than the visitor who is visiting from Bangladesh.

To avoid this issue, you have to use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) which will improve your website speed for all users of your website.

A CDN is a network that is made up of servers all over the world and it is used to store all static files needed for your website.

Here static files mean those files which are not changeable like CSS, JS, and images. Remember that you can’t host dynamic files like WordPress files. As WordPress pages are dynamic, these can’t be hosted in CDN.

Using a CDN is more beneficial and it will make your website faster. So, every time users visit your website, they are served the static files from whichever server is closer to them. As a result, your website will be faster.

If you want to know how the CDN works, please see the following infographic –

I recommend using Stackpath CDN. It is compatible with WordPress and caching plugins.

Avoid uploading Audio and Video directly

You have the scope of uploading any audio and video file on your website directly but I highly recommend you avoid it.

NEVER upload any audio or video file directly in your website media library. Because it will make your website heavy loaded. As a result, the loading time of your website must be higher.

When you upload any audio or video file on your website directly, it runs with an HTML5 player. For this reason, it cost the bandwidth of your website.

Even your hosting provider can stop their service to you although you can choose unlimited bandwidth for your website.

So, avoiding uploading audio or video file directly. In this case, you can get a good solution. For this, you have to use any audio and video hosting services like Youtube, Vimeo, SoundCloud, DailyMotion, etc.

First, you have to upload your audio or video file in one of these hosts, then simply copy and paste the audio or video’s URL and embed it in your WordPress website. WordPress has this built-in embedding facility.

Use light-weight theme

In the case of choosing a theme for your website, you have to pay full attention to choose a simple, light-weighted and well-coded theme.

Usually, the theme which contains complex layouts, flashy animation or extra unnecessary features, try your best to avoid them. You can choose any good plugin for extra features.

Try your best to use the premium themes from the best theme shops like StudioPress, Themify, CSSIginter, etc. They provide the simple, light-weight and well-coded theme.

So, choose the best-optimized theme for your website so that your website be a faster site ever.

Always Use Well-Coded Faster Plugins

So, before installing a plugin check its review and coding quality. Standard coding is preferable. Well-coded plugins are always best for your website with the best optimization.

Advanced Steps for WORDPRESS Speedup

If you have completed the above all steps successfully, I will say that you have done a lot and now your website is optimized properly and its loading time very low. It means now your website is a fast loading website.

But if there are some other advanced tips and tricks which can make your website fastest and the loading time of your website will be the fraction of a second.

These tips are little more technical and you need some technical knowledge. Because you will need to modify your site. For this reason, you need to have knowledge of PHP.

There is also a precaution for you if you don’t have deep knowledge of PHP. It is better for you taking a back up of your website before starting to modify it.

Split a Post into Pages Instead of a Long Post

A longer post is always golden content for your website. Because the readers like to read a longer post which contains deep knowledge. Besides, a longer post has a great benefit for raking in search engines.

But displaying the long post on a single page is not good for your website speed optimization. If your post contains a number of images, it will be worse for your site. It will increase the loading time and make it lazier to load.

So, you have to follow a better way to display your long posts. In this case, you have to split the post into a number of pages.

Don’t worry, you don’t need to install any extra plugin or implement any extra codes for doing this. You just need to follow simple instructions. Because WordPress has a built-in solution for this.

For doing this, just simply add <!––next page––> tag in your post where you want to split your posts into pages.

This tip will help you to make your website fast. It is really simple and so funny.

External HTTP Requests Reduction

In the case of some WordPress themes and plugins, they load all files like scripts, stylesheets, and images from other websites or external resources like facebook, youtube, google or other analytics services, etc.

It’s ok and it is better. But sometimes it can be a danger to your website. If the number of these external requests is low, it is absolutely fine but if it becomes many requests, it is completely bad for your website. It will slow down your website.

So, optimization is needed for these many requests. In this case, there are two options for this. One is to disable the scripts or stylesheets and another is to merge all scripts or stylesheets or images into a single file.

Database Calls Reduction

This step is a little technical step and you need to have a good understanding of PHP and the WordPress Template Files.

There are a number of themes and plugins which are poorly coded. As a result, there are a lot of unnecessary database calls.

But in case of some well-coded themes, you will also find a number of database calls. Actually, you can’t blame the developer for this. Because the developer doesn’t have any other scope to skip or avoid this.

Remember one thing is that here <?php means the start of calling new database.

You can’t blame the developer because the developer doesn’t know your exact language that you will use for your website.

So, it is really complicated to reduce database calls. In this case, I suggest using a child theme. So that you can customize your site with the child theme. If you choose a child theme, you can simply replace these codes with the following codes to reduce the database calls.

<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml” dir=”ltr”>

<head profile=”http://gmpg.org/xfn/11″>

<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″ />

WordPress Database optimization

If you have used WordPress for a while, you will find that there are a number of unnecessary extra information in your website database which is not actually needed for your website.

But this unnecessary information is running in your website database. As a result, your website may slow down and loading time will increase.

So, you have to clean up your website database. Because it will make your website fast.

I recommend using WP-Sweep Plugin. It is really an awesome plugin. You don’t need any technical knowledge to complete this step. It is super easy and can be done with a simple click.

This plugin will clean up your database deleting the trashed posts, revisions, unused tags or categories etc. It will also optimize the structure of your website database and make your website fast.

Post Revisions Limitation

Post revisions mean the record or history of editing any post. Post revisions take space in your database. So, this unnecessary history is needed to fix it into a small number.

You can easily set a limitation for the revisions for each post. In this case, you just need to have an idea of WP File structure. Just simply find out the wp-config.php file and paste the following code in that file –

define( ‘WP_POST_REVISIONS’, 4 );

This code means that just the last 4 revisions will be saved in your website database for each post. You can also decrease this number as per your wish.

Disable Hotlinking and Leeching of the Content

If the content quality of your website is high, you have sad news for it that there is a great possibility to get stolen sooner or later.

Especially your images will be used on the other websites from your website. As a result, no visitor will be generated for your website. But every time visiting their websites, your bandwidth will be used.

Its sound is bad but it is true and there is no doubt. So, you have to take an effective step so that your images can not be stolen and used.

To do this you have to access the .htaccess file of your website. Mind it that, in this stage, you should have a little bit of knowledge about it.

Finally, just copy and paste the following codes in .htaccess file –

#disable hotlinking of images with forbidden or custom image option

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?domain_name.com [NC]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http(s)?://(www\.)?google.com [NC]

RewriteRule \.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif)$ – [NC,F,L]

In the above code, never forget to replace the text domain_name.com with your own domain name.

Using Lazy Loading If Needed

If your website contains many images, multiple videos and many blog posts photos, lazy loading can be a great benefit for this certain stage.

Lazy loading will help to fix the problem. Lazy loading will only download those content which will be visible on the user’s screen.

It has a great advantage that it will replace all photos or videos with a placeholder. The content will visible only when the user scrolls to the specific item.

If you are interested in using lazy loading for your website, I can recommend some awesome plugins for this particular function.

Use the DNS Level WordPress Firewall

A WordPress firewall plugin is an awesome tool which is really helpful. It helps you to block malware, hacking attempts and brute force attacks.

But there is a problem that the functionality of all firewall plugins is not the same. These firewall plugins are well if your website is not attacked yet. But if the hackers already got access to your website, in this case, this type of firewall plugin is not enough.

For this reason, to get the optimum performance, I recommend DNS level firewalls like Sucuri and Cloudflare. They block all malware of your website even if the hackers already got access to your website.

Fixing SSL Errors

There may have a common error and that is called mixed content errors. You will face this error if you are switching your site to HTTPS/SSL.

By installing a related plugin like Really Simple SSL plugin, you can easily fix this error. But there is a problem with this fixing. Firstly, these plugins cache all URLs and then convert these into HTTPS and finally send them to the user’s browser.

So, the best way is to fix the SSL errors manually which is the best way.

Use the Latest PHP Version

PHP is a server-side programming language. It means the language runs on a hosting server. WordPress is written in PHP language. So, you should have a concern about using the PHP version.

Most of the server hosting uses the latest version of PHP in their server. But in some cases, you may also find an older version.

The updated version is faster than the older version. So, it is the best practice for your website that always uses the latest version of PHP. It will make your website fast and optimized.